Kill’ a word that’s been done to death

The airwaves abound with well-meaning analysts trying to make sense out of the senseless horror in Connecticut.

The usual suspects have been rounded up — the proliferation of weapons and the inadequacies of our mental health services in particular.

All well and good, but does it not occur to the talking heads how pervasive are the references and expressions we all use so casually in everyday conversation, especially in the world of pop entertainment?

At the level of the man in the street, one of the most common four-letter words in the contemporary lexicon is “kill.”

We’d kill for a ticket to the Super Bowl, a convertible for Christmas, even a good steak. That gal over yon is dressed to kill. The guy with her has a killer tan. They both have plenty of time to kill. He just killed a six-pack. She, well if looks could kill…but all she says is, “You really kill me, dude.”

In the recording world, a source of example-setting for the young, one of the top rock bands, out of Vegas, is The Killers, not to be confused with another highly popular outfit, The Kills. Both have killer albums on the charts.

Bill O’Reilly, high priest of television’s Fox News, co-authored a New York Times best-seller last year called “Killing Lincoln.” It sold a million copies, and is soon to be a TV movie, with Tom Hanks narrating. This year, O’Reilly and partner followed up with “Killing Kennedy,” which also hit the million mark.

There’s something about a killer title.

Then there’s the hit song, “Kill or Be Killed” by Jay Rock (sample lyrics: “Hungry enough to come and get you, hope the gun is coming with you, gonna have to shoot it out and shoot in front, time is now you wasn’t focused, you sound like you had posted no tags it was stolen, and then it was murder motives…”)

Nice stuff for impressionable young minds, and this is one of the more benign, if unfathomable, passages in the entire opus.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” makes most lists of the all-time greatest films, though the title is more violent than the message it sent.

More recently popular were “The Killing Fields,” set in Cambodia, where more than a million were killed in genocide, and “Kill Bill,” rated R for strong bloody violence at the hands of an assassination squad.

Neither of them used for a soundtrack the popular tune, “Killing Me Softly.”

Killers are everywhere in the pop culture. And closer to real life, we have killer smiles and killer bees, killer jokes and killer fees, killer A’s to Killer Z’s.

One thing that (begging your pardon) kills me about our current national conversation is that so many of the Hollywood celebrities, among the most vocal in the land about outlawing guns, are beholden for their fame and fortunes to the very industry that spews and spatters all that violence across our movie screens every day of the year in bloody glorious Technicolor.

In this man’s humble opinion — and I know you haven’t asked for it — we should get the military and gangster machine guns off the public streets. Real sportsmen and women don’t need them.

But we also need to rein in the way we toss around the word “kill” so lightly — as if it were somehow totally unrelated to the lives and deaths of real human beings.